A significant contribution to history, The Journal of Hélène Berr is a heart-breaking story of a heroic young woman whose indomitable spirit thrived in the face of prejudice and war. The work of a stunningly talented writer, Hélène's journal is both an intensely moving, intimate document, and a text of astonishing literary accomplishment.

From April 1942 to February 1944, Hélène Berr, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne, kept a journal of her life in Nazi-occupied Paris, seeking refuge from the harsh realities of being a Jew under the Vichy regime. With her friends and fellow students, Hélène plays the violin and escapes the everyday in what she calls the "selfish magic" of English literature and poetry. Although she comes from a privileged and sophisticated family-her father is a decorated French officer of the First World War and the distinguished director of a large chemical company-she begins to be assailed by anxieties. With difficulty, Hélène keeps to what routine she can: studying, reading, enjoying the beauty of Paris, and looking after the children of arrested Jewish families.

Hélène writes of literature, music, love, and the beauty of her city, striving to remain calm and rational even as tragedy closes in. But as anti-Semitic ordinances are passed and rumors of mass exterminations surface, we bear witness to the shift in Hélène's world and inner life.

In 1944, Hélène and her parents were arrested and sent to Drancy. On her twenty-third birthday they were taken by train to Auschwitz, where her parents died within six months. Hélène was forced to march to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in April 1945, just days before British troops arrived to liberate the camp.

Entrusted by Hélène to her family's longtime cook before she was taken away, Hélène's journal survived as a family heirloom over the years until her niece recently decided to share it with the world. A devastatingly lucid account of one of history's darkest moments, it has become an instant classic. Translated and published in more than fifteen countries, The Journal of Hélène Berr-now available in English for the first time-is a treasure at last found....

Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp.

On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’s Nazi occupiers. Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking.

The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.” More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp.

The journal did eventually reach her fiancé, and for over fifty years it was kept private. In 2002, it was donated to the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. Before it was first published in France in January 2008, translation rights had already been sold for twelve languages....